IT Standards for Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry

HL7: Health Level Seven (HL7) is an ANSI accredited standards organization that focuses on the interface requirements of the entire health care organization, including clinical and administrative data.

IHE:
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) is an initiative by to improve the sharing of electronic healthcare data, not by inventing its own set of standards, but rather by profiling specifications that already exist, like HL7, to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care.

HIPAA:
The United States Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996. Title II of the Act focuses on simplifying administration procedures, and requires the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions, national identifiers for providers, health insurance providers, and employers. Additionally title II addresses the sensitive nature of this data by requiring security and privacy provisions. The result is standards designed to facilitate more efficient processes in the healthcare industry, and these are manifested in the HIPAA/EDI set of standards.

SNOMED:
The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) pursues advancements in patient care through their terminology and implementation support products and services. The clinical terminology covers diseases, technical findings and procedures, allowing for a consistent way of describing, indexing, storing, retrieving, and aggregating clinical data